For months, Riverside Heights residents have posted videos of unregistered ATVs and dirt bikes weaving through traffic and popping wheelies past playgrounds. Now they're bringing those videos to city hall.
Riverside Heights residents packed a community meeting this week to demand action against groups of ATV and dirt bike riders they say have taken over neighborhood streets most weekend evenings, weaving through traffic, riding on sidewalks and, in several documented cases, passing within feet of children playing near the Kestrel River Greenway.
Council Member Aisha Muhammad, who represents the district and chairs the council’s housing committee, said she has received more resident complaints about the ATV riders in the past two months than about any other issue in her district this year. “I’ve had constituents tell me they won’t let their kids play in the front yard on Friday nights anymore,” Muhammad said. “That is not an acceptable trade-off for anyone.”
Police say pursuit policy limits their response
A Bellwater Police Department spokesperson said officers have documented more than 30 separate ATV and dirt bike complaints in Riverside Heights since early in the year, but that the department’s pursuit policy generally bars officers from chasing unregistered off-road vehicles at high speed through residential streets, citing the risk to riders, officers and bystanders. “We understand the frustration, but a policy written after serious pursuit-related injuries elsewhere isn’t something we’re going to abandon because it’s inconvenient,” the spokesperson said.
Instead, the department said it has relied on identifying riders through social media videos posted by the riders themselves, a tactic that has led to four citations and one arrest for reckless driving since spring. Chief Roberta Simms said the department is exploring additional tools, including temporary vehicle impoundment for repeat offenders caught on private property, and has asked the city’s public works department to review whether speed bumps or other traffic-calming measures could be added to the most affected streets.
We are not going to put an officer’s life or a rider’s life at risk chasing a dirt bike down Riverside Avenue at 40 miles an hour. But we hear the neighborhood, and we are working on options that don’t require that.
Chief Roberta Simms, Bellwater Police Department
Residents want a faster fix
Some residents said they were unsatisfied with the pace of the response. Marlene Ochoa, who has lived on Riverside Avenue for 11 years, said she has submitted video of the same group of riders to police on six separate occasions without an arrest. “I appreciate that they can’t do a car chase down my street, I really do,” Ochoa said. “But six times and nothing changes tells me the department needs a different plan, not just more patience from me.”
Others pointed to the neighborhood’s mix of quiet residential blocks and the popular greenway trail as reasons the issue feels especially urgent. “This isn’t some empty industrial road,” said resident Paul Ferris, who organized the petition that brought roughly 140 signatures to this week’s meeting. “This is where people are pushing strollers.”
Muhammad said she plans to bring a formal request to the full council next month asking the police department to report back on impoundment options and traffic-calming measures within 60 days, and said she would explore whether city funds could support additional lighting and cameras along the most affected stretch of Riverside Avenue.
The complaints echo concerns raised in other parts of the city over the years about off-road vehicles on public streets, though Riverside Heights residents say the volume of recent activity is unusual for the neighborhood. Simms said the department will hold a follow-up community meeting once new enforcement options are finalized, and asked residents to continue documenting incidents in the meantime. “The videos residents are sending us are actually helping build citations after the fact,” Simms said. “Keep sending them, even when it doesn’t feel like anything happens right away.”
Muhammad said she does not expect a single fix to resolve the issue but wants residents to see visible progress before the weather warms further and the riding season, as she put it, “hits full swing again.”
Some meeting attendees pressed for a more aggressive response, including asking whether the city could deploy license-plate-reading cameras at the neighborhood’s main entry points, an idea Simms said the department would evaluate but cautioned would do little against unregistered vehicles that carry no plates at all. Others argued the underlying issue was a lack of any legal place in the city for young riders to use ATVs and dirt bikes, and suggested the parks department explore a supervised riding area on city-owned land outside residential neighborhoods.
Muhammad said she was open to that idea as a longer-term complement to enforcement, noting that several riders identified through citations so far have been teenagers. “If part of what’s happening here is that kids don’t have anywhere else to do this, then arresting our way out of it forever isn’t really a plan,” she said. “But that’s a conversation for the next few months, not an excuse to do nothing about Friday nights on Riverside Avenue right now.”